PANORAM Schallplatten & CDs

Review: There's no doubt that determined man-of-mystery Panoram has a unique musical voice, as anyone who checked his thrillingly evocative, impossible-to-pigeonhole debut LP for Firecracker, Everyone Is A Door, would no doubt attest. It's unsurprising, then, to find that this follow-up is equally as evocative, with even more musical reference points - skewed downtempo jazz, Balearica, solo piano pieces, vibrant synthscapes etc. - joining his usual liquid ambience, synth-doodles and immersive electronic moods. The album is nominally a meditation on "the nature of memories and reality", but it many ways the concept is secondary. At the end of the day, the music is magical, and that's all that counts.

Review: Gerd Jansen's faultless Running Back is back with another of its hard-to-define but essential albums, Keep Looking Where The Light Comes From, this time from Panoram. It is a record that blurs the line between chaos and beauty, with fuzzy synths and improvised rhythms offering up some intriguing sound designs and unusual textures. There is a psychedelic feel to many of those, but so too a dream-like quality where barely-there melodies and half-remembered vocals drift in and out of earshot. Both maximal and minimal compositions feature with nods to ASMR pleasures and a mix of synthetic and acoustic sounds.